Tenant’s Urgent Call
Hi, this is John Dale from GlobileNet again. Just talking about our electrical contracting works. I had a call from Abdul, who was actually a tenant in a property. And he called me because his needs were pretty urgent.
Rain Causes Power Outage
There had been a bit of rain around and his lights had all gone out the night before. He tried everything that he could and couldn’t get them back on. And so after talking to the landlord, I went out to see Abdul at his property and have a look at the problem.
When Circuit Breakers Trip
Now, it’s very awkward when you’ve got a problem where the circuit breaker trips and it’s caused by an Earth fault. Usually, if it’s a short circuit, you can tell by the way the switches poofs, like when you try to switch it on. When it’s an Earth leakage fault, it’ll be floppy, it looks like the switch is broken at the switchboard.
First Troubleshooting Checks
Anyway, this was certainly a floppy switch. We obviously do the things that look obvious. We take lamps out of the fixtures, we check lights, outdoor lights in particular because of rain and the most likely points of failure will be outdoor lights. We look around for any water damage in the ceilings just in case, because you can often see if there’s been some seepage inside and that’s affecting lights or things like that.
Hard to Pinpoint the Fault
After doing that extensively, we couldn’t find anything that was particularly useful. And so we were finding that we could turn the circuit breaker on and it would stay on for a couple of minutes. But then when we went around to turn lights on, the lights would come on sometimes, but then it would trip. So there was obviously some sort of… Well, we didn’t know quite what it might be, but something that was rather sounding like a loose wire, specifically.
Isolating the Circuit
So what we do in that case is we go to the center point or what we think might be the middle of the circuit. We drop the light down in that location and we disconnect all the wires. We have to separate all the wires so that there’s no wires that are connecting to each other. Then we go back to the switchboard while they’re disconnected and put the circuit breaker on, if we can. And that identifies generally whether I’ve got a problem on this side of the break or the other side of the break.
Narrowing It Down
In this case, the switch circuit breaker switched on again and we tested the lights. And by testing the lights in a logical manner, you can see which lights are on up until that point where we’ve disconnected wires. Then we can see after that which lights are off. We make a note of which rooms are not working after we’ve done that. Then we obviously trip the breaker and make it safe. We reconnect that light, try it again and find that it’s now faulty again. So we now know which rooms to go to. So then we go to what we think might be the middle point of the house. So in this case, we’re talking about four rooms and the outside light.
Fault Found in Wobbly Fan
So we took the middle bedroom and dropped a fan down. Now, when we dropped the fan down, what had happened is the wires, the fan had, apparently, obviously, we weren’t able to test that, but the fan had been wobbly for a very, very long time. And I’m talking, the customer said, quite wobbly. So we said, okay, when we had taken the fan down, we could see it was so wobbly that the connector block had wires that had disconnected. And as the fan was turned on, it would wobble and the wire would touch the metal frame of the fan. And that actually was what was causing the trip. It was nothing to do with the rain. So that was a relatively easy fix.
Testing the Fix
So having disconnected or reconnecting the fan, we turned the circuit breaker on, everything’s working fine, and we test the fan, and indeed, it’s very, very wobbly. And I said to him, Well, we can’t leave the fan like this because it’s likely to cause a problem in the future. It had a good fixing base, but it was a very old fan, a very cheap fan by the look of it.
Replacing the Fan
So we actually went with the permission of the landlord, went to buy a new van from Bunnings. So we were given a budget and got approval to buy that fan, replaced it, and the tenant was very happy and the landlord was very happy. So we managed to get a good review from Abdul and haven’t seen him since.
